Digital platforms are an omnipresent phenomenon that challenges incumbents by changing how we consume and provide digital products and services. Whereas traditional firms create value within the boundaries of a company or a supply chain, digital platforms utilize an ecosystem of autonomous agents to co-create value. Scholars from various disciplines, such as economics, technology management, and information systems have taken different perspectives on digital platform ecosystems. In this Fundamentals article, we first synthesize research on digital platforms and digital platform ecosystems to provide a definition that integrates both concepts. Second, we use this definition to explain how different digital platform ecosystems vary according to three core building blocks: (1) platform ownership, (2) value-creating mechanisms, and (3) complementor autonomy. We conclude by giving an outlook on four overarching research areas that connect the building blocks: (1) technical properties and value creation; (2) complementor interaction with the ecosystem; (3) value capture; and (4) the make-or-join decision in digital platform ecosystems.

Moving beyond value creation in individual companies, firms have integrated customers, partners, and stakeholders in a mutual value co-creation process. Examples are platforms such as Apple's App Store, where external developers use boundary resources provided on the platform to develop and share applications in an ecosystem. While value co-creation on business-to-consumer platforms is common practice, research on their business-to-business (B2B) counterparts is still sparse. The goal of this paper is to analyze how B2B platforms utilize value co-creation practices. We conduct a multiple case study in the context of emerging Internet of things (IoT) platforms highlighting that B2B platforms follow three standardized value co-creation practices. The platform encourages the supply side through the (1) integration of complementary assets, the demand-side through (2) ensuring platform readiness and connects both processes by (3) servitization through application enablement. We conclude by showing how platforms leverage different boundary resources in a process of standardization to develop a scalable infrastructure that explains how platforms enable value co-creation within their ecosystem.

Companies across industries are shifting toward a platform ecosystem strategy. By leveraging cloud computing technologies, companies aim to benefit from collaboration with a wide range of third-party developers within emergent platform ecosystems. To succeed, these companies need to develop new organizational capabilities to co-create and capture value in platform ecosystems. To understand what capabilities are crucial to establish platform ecosystems and how they contribute to value co-creation and value capture, we conducted a multi-year, in-depth case study of SAP’s cloud platform project. We identified (1) technology-related capabilities (cloud-based platformization, open IT landscape management) and (2) relationship-driven capabilities (ecosystem orchestration, platform evangelism, platform co-selling) and illustrate how these capabilities help the platform owner to enable and balance value co-creation and value capture in an emergent platform ecosystem. With our findings, we contribute to the discussion on how companies can overcome the challenging emergent phase of platform ecosystems. We thereby bridge literature on value creation in platform ecosystems and on organizational capabilities. Though we conducted our study in the context of the enterprise software industry, we discuss how our findings apply to prospective platform owners from different contexts.

Multi-sided platforms (MSPs) are one of the dominant designs of the digital age. However, prior research focuses mainly on established MSPs, leaving little insight into their emergence. We use the literature on technological trajectories and technology diffusion to derive four propositions that increase our understanding on the emergence of MSPs. The propositions include the emergence of native MSPs based on the assimilation of technologies in technological trajectories; how uncertainty influences incumbents to not follow those trajectories; how native MSPs create new demand; and how this demand eventually triggers the transformation process of incumbents to transform toward an MSP provider. We conduct a multiple-case study in the context of mobility services with three native MSP companies along with an incumbent that is transforming toward an MSP provider. The resulting process model shows that MSPs follow a process of sense-making and bricolage to assemble a service-oriented architecture, contrary to the incumbent who adopts technologies according to its institutional logic to improve existing products and processes.

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Mobile applications (apps) have long fueled the growth of digital business models. However, an increasing reluctance amongst smartphone users to download them has surfaced. For services of infrequent use, it is questionable whether native apps and their respective app stores still offer a suitable development strategy. In China, a novel phenomenon responds to the debate, introducing lightweight micro-apps embedded into the social messaging platform of WeChat. Known as Mini-Programs (MPs), WeChat enables third-party developers to create light apps within its own infrastructure, essentially creating an ecosystem of apps within an app. Supported by an exploratory case study, we shed light on this platform innovation and investigate its implications within the field of mobile platform ecosystems. Our findings implicate that the one-sizefits-all approach of native apps as a general-purpose technology does not meet specific needs of platform users and could be supplemented by innovations such as MPs to fill the gap.

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